Over the last 6 years I tried to onboard a huge amount of people. Unfortunately, most didn't stay around for long. The reasons all boil down to the same thing I think.
Not everyone is a content creator. While everyone likes to share some things once in a while, most time spent on social media usually is consuming.
But it's very hard for a new user to find content that interests them. While communities help (if there is one for the specific interests of the user), there's still too much posted in general-purpose (vote farming) communities, or on a personal blog only using tags.
The success of mainstream social media comes from their ability to analyze posts and users. When you sign up, you're asked about your interests, and immediately get immersed by being offered content that aligns with them.
And I think that's one of our main problems. We don't know anything about our users, although we have quite a big amount of data about them available.
So I started working on a new project recently to fix that. Working name is DeepHive, because I'm not creative with that kind of stuff and it gives an idea about what it's supposed to be doing.
I prepared a database to fill with posts and analyze them. There are several challenges to be solved here already, automatic language detection isn't too good with open source tools, and preparing the data to train ai models will require a lot of manual tagging. Luckily I'm well connected with curators, and I hope I'll be able to make them help with this without adding too much to their workload.
But it's not finished after that. A lot of the metadata other platforms have readily available is lost for us. Where does a user click, how much time does he spend there, did he vote manually or automated? All these points are valuable information. Of course for some people it's the appeal of Hive that no data is stored about them. I think, when the goal is mass adoption, that's a niche group though. Most people are happy to have their interests analyzed and be offered content (and ads) that might be relevant to them.
So on top of the data we can harvest on-chain, in the long run we will need integration with interfaces. If this will be a new platform, or if we can integrate with @peakd or @ecency has to be seen. Of course it'll have to be strictly opt-in, and users should always have full control over what's being stored about them and what not.
Obviously, this project is way beyond what I as a single dev could stem, and my witness pay isn't enough for even 1 additional full-timer. That's why I decided to post about it now already, without having anything to present yet. If you're familiar with machine learning, text analysis and/or user profiling, and you're interested in using these skills to bring hive to the mainstream, please hit me up (best on Discord).
If not, tell me in the comments here what you think about it. Do you agree with the evaluation, and do you think a more tailor-made experience would help with retention? Would you be fine with your data being used to create a better experience for everyone? What's a red line you wouldn't want to see crossed?